Marriage matters, and it should be rewarded

Time is running out if David Cameron is to honour his pledge in the Coalition
Agreement.

The Pakistani groom had to make a telephone call to his marriage 'fixer' to ask his bride's name Photo: ALAMY

By Tim Loughton

9:38PM GMT 09 Dec 2012

Whether it is the Mitchells’ constant refrain in EastEnders that “we’re family” or David Cameron’s pre-election cri de coeur that family is in his DNA, family matters to most people. Without getting bogged down in the truism that modern families come in many different forms, all the research shows that the presence of mum and dad throughout childhood gives children the best chance of good health, successful education and freedom from dependency or the justice system.

At its most extreme, the absence of strong family structures contributes to the chaos of the herd instinct and lawlessness that we saw in last summer’s riots. On an everyday basis, family breakdown costs society £44 billion a year, so it is vital that we heed the shocking revelation from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) that 48 per cent of all children will see the breakdown of their parents’ relationship. Or that by the end of his or her childhood, a youngster is considerably more likely to have a television set in his or her bedroom than a father living at home.

Family matters to Mr Cameron and to the Conservative Party. I hope that family still matters to this Government. And under the banner of family, marriage matters especially. A commitment to recognising marriage in the tax system was included in the last Conservative Party manifesto and it was in the Coalition Agreement, notwithstanding the get-out provisions for our Coalition partners to abstain. The statistic that if your parents are still together when you are 16 there is a 97 per cent chance that they are married is in itself enough to justify our enthusiasm.

So it is a huge letdown that last week’s Autumn Statement appears to have failed to make good the Coalition Government’s promise on a transferable tax allowance between married couples. A fully transferable allowance for all one-earner married couples with children under 16 would have been a credible and good place to start. Research in the US has shown that a stable family home can raise a child’s chances of escaping the poverty trap by 82 per cent. So this measure represents an important element in the Government’s vital battle against child poverty, coupled with raising the game of an education system that has long suffered from a poverty of expectation for too many of our children from disadvantaged postcodes.

The silence in the Autumn Statement is particularly worrying because of the lead time it will take for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to make the required IT improvements to initiate the transferable allowance in the lifetime of this Parliament and deliver on the Coalition pledge. The Prime Minister has always kept the promises made in the Coalition Agreement, such as those on pensioner benefits and overseas aid. This is no time and no subject on which to start breaking promises.

The CSJ’s poll, published today, reveals that not just 47 per cent of Conservative supporters feel betrayed by the PM on this omission but 35 per cent of all voters. I doubt that the Government will enjoy anything like compensatory approval ratings for announcing in the same week that gay marriage has apparently become a more urgent issue for Government action, despite no similar manifesto commitment to legislate and after a massive consultation exercise that has been overwhelmingly negative.

Now let us not be caricatured into thinking that most or many people fall in love and marry for financial reasons. However, when they fall in love and decide that they want to be together, they face a choice. Do they marry and make a public lifelong commitment to each other in law or do they move in with each other and see how it goes? And as Lord Hill of Oareford, my former colleague and education minister, has reminded the Lords, research from the millennium cohort study suggests that the poorest 20 per cent of married couples are more stable than all but the richest 20 per cent of cohabiting couples. Marriage is not just a preserve of the middle classes.

If you look around the OECD and the EU, Britain is virtually alone in not recognising marriage in the tax system. The latest international comparison figures demonstrate that UK one-earner married couples on an average wage with two children face a tax burden that is 42 per cent greater than the OECD average. Add this to the hugely complicating child benefit reforms that are about to hit some of the most stable, striving and hard-working families and it raises the question, why do we seem intent on penalising those we should be most encouraging?

Iain Duncan Smith is rightly overhauling the marriage penalty in the benefit system and the universal credit reforms must succeed. But the gold standard of the transferable tax allowance must not be sunk by pandering to the nuptially agnostic Lib Dems. Hard-working married couples as well as those committed through civil partnerships save the state money. More than ever they need the state to recognise and reward that.

Tony Blair’s words back in 1995 that “a strong society cannot be morally neutral about the family” still ring true, but for those without morals surely the state cannot be fiscally neutral either.

Tim Loughton is the Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham and a former Minister for Children and Families